1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to printer technology for directly accessing a resource existing on a network such as the Internet, and downloading and printing such resource.
2. Description of the Related Art
A network-compatible printer connected to a network such as a LAN (Local Area Network) and shared by a plurality of computers has been conventionally known. This type of printer passively receives a print request sent from the computer via the network and prints in accordance therewith.
Meanwhile, in recent years, the WWW (World Wide Web) is rapidly becoming popular on the Internet. In this WWW, the browser on the client computer obtains a resource (information resource, such as a Web page) by accessing a Web server in accordance with a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). Upon the browser obtaining this resource, if a resource previously obtained from the same URI is cached on a hard disk or the like, the browser uses such cached resource without accessing the Web server. The browser presents this obtained resource on a screen, or stores it on a hard disk or the like. The browser converts this obtained resource into a print request when necessary, and sends this request to the printer.
As mentioned above, a typical conventional printer would print upon passively receiving a print request sent from a computer, and could not obtain the resource by actively accessing the server.
Thus, when a user is to print a resource on the WWW, the user must foremost turn on the computer and activate the browser, access the Web server by operating this browser and then, after obtaining the desired resource, send a print request to the printer.
Incidentally, although a printer has sufficient memory for generating print data, it cannot obtain all the resources when trying to directly obtain such resources from the Web server due to the limitation in the capacity of this memory. Therefore, even when attempting to obtain all the resources, an error may occur prior to printing if the memory is not able to read all such resources. Moreover, this led to wasteful communication resources.